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For his book, From Yesterday to Today: Six Decades of America’s Favorite Morning Show, writer Stephen Battaglio delved into the NBC archives to give fans a behind-the-scenes look at the nation’s most enduring morning program, which celebrates its 60th anniversary in January. The end result is a compelling chronicle of failures and successes, complete with the requisite drama and heartwarming moments not unlike the stories the program presents to its viewers each morning. Today Turns 60: A Look Back

Anniversary aside, why is the Today show’s story one worth telling? “This is a program that has had the same mission since it started in January of 1952, and it does a lot of the same things that it did the very first day,” Battaglio says. “But in order to survive and to stay No. 1, you have to adapt and this program has done that.” Battaglio recently took some time to speak with PARADE about the book. As a journalist who covers television, and having appeared on the Today show, how would you describe its anchors? Authentic. You really can’t get away with being someone you are not on these shows. With morning television, you’re getting out of bed, you’re turning on the television, and you’re raw, you’re vulnerable. You don’t really know what’s ahead during the day. And so the first contact you have with the outside world is this program. If you’re not real, if you’re not honest, if you’re not yourself, the people will not come back. It’s unlike any other relationship the viewer has with people on television.

And, you need to be able to seamlessly segue from a story about Obama’s healthcare overhaul to a story about Kim Kardashian’s divorce. That was an ongoing tension for the entire run of the show. How serious do we need to be, and how much fun can we have, and to find the balance in that.

Who is the best example of that balance? Barbara Walters was on the show, and she had her own struggles on the program because she was a woman, and women weren’t allowed to do certain things on the program. So she had to fight to make her own way, to do the serious stories that she wanted to do. At the same time, Barbara was very comfortable talking with celebrities and with show business. Barbara herself knew how to perform. Barbara would sometimes fill in on The Tonight Show and sing and dance, and it was heresy that a journalist would actually do that. But Barbara understood that TV journalists also could be TV personalities — in fact they had to be. I think she set the template for the job of the morning person. Someone who had to be serious and smart and understand the issues and be a good interviewer, but also have fun.

She was really the first person to do that on a morning show, and Katie [Couric] mastered it. She was the one who really knew how to shift gears from fun to serious to tough. She could always just turn on a dime, which is why she’s probably the most successful person on the history of the show.

Who had a hard time achieving that mixture of serious and fun? John Chancellor — really one of the great journalists in the history of the industry — was not able to do the Today show. He was a funny guy — extremely witty — but he didn’t know how to do that on TV spontaneously. Tom Brokaw was an anchor on Today and he was always concerned that the show did not alter his plan for his career, which was to be a serious journalist. He stayed as long as he absolutely had to, but at the same time he believed that if he stayed there too long that he wouldn’t be able to do things he wanted to do for the rest of his career.

How has the Today show managed to endure, when every channel seems to have a morning show these days? One thing I came away with in being immersed in the show’s history and also talking to the people who work on it, is that there’s an understanding that they are part of something that is unlike anything else in American broadcasting. Everybody understands what this show means to the viewer. The people who work on it really get it in a profound way. They know what the show means to the people who come to New York to visit and stand there at 7 a.m. in the morning with a sign, or line up around the corner to see a concert, sometimes a day before, sometimes two days before.

Is there anything you can reveal about Today’s plans for its anniversary this coming January? In doing this book, I looked at all the anniversary shows from the past, and the people who worked on the show, they really do feel like they are part of a special fraternity. People come back for every anniversary for as long as they’re alive. I’ll expect you’ll see a lot of old friends on the 60th anniversary.

AMG/Parade Digital

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